Simple Tip Turns Kindle into Ultimate News Reader

One of the best things about the Gadget Lab is our awesome readership, and this tip comes from Gadget Lab fan Ron Winters. Ron has actually managed to make the Kindle’s “experimental” web-browser functional. Better still, it is an always-connected client for reading your own personal news.

Up until the latest version, the Kindle’s browser fully deserved its “experimental” tag. In fact, “excremental” would have been more apt. It was clunky, slow and almost impossible to use. Anecdotal reports say that the Kindle 3 has a much better browser, and now Ron has proven it with a great hack for using Google Reader. The trick lies in keyboard shortcuts and the oft-forgotten full-screen mode. It works like this:

First, log into your Google Reader account and use the awkward cursor control to navigate your feed list. Then hit the “right” cursor to enter the news articles themselves. Then comes the trick: just press “f” to enter full-screen mode, instantly turning your Kindle into a custom newspaper. You can scroll through the article with the Kindle’s page-turn buttons, and – using Google Reader’s keyboard commands – press “j” and “k” to page through articles.

Ron says that “this works best with images turned off in the kindle browser” and with a bigger font size for easier reading: “I happen to like 200%,” he says. One of the first things I tried to do with my second-gen Kindle was browse to Google Reader – it’s a natural fit – but it was too slow and awkward to actually use. Ironically, given that the Google Reader site is not yet optimized for the iPad, the humble Kindle could turn out to be the best mobile newsreader yet.